Saint Joseph Catholic Church

Despite the loss of 307,117 Catholics in 2025, German dioceses received additional revenue from the Kirchensteuer (Church tax). Revenue rose from 6.628 billion euros ($7.58 billion) in 2024 to 6.751 billion euros ($7.72 billion) in 2025.

“In Germany, religious communities that are corporations under public law have a right to levy taxes on their members,” The Pillar explained. “Every person in Germany who is officially registered as a member of the Catholic Church is required to pay church tax equivalent to 8-9% of their income tax liability, depending on the region in which they live.”

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Weeks after he removed Msgr. Stephen Rossetti as an archdiocesan exorcist, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., said in an interview that the dismissal ultimately “wasn’t touching on the question of UFOs” and that “my major objection is that I think the traditional role of an exorcist is a very private one. It’s a sacred one.”

At the time of Msgr. Rossetti’s removal, Cardinal McElroy said that “statements made by Monsignor Rossetti linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center’s recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”

Echoing a February letter to leaders of the House Agricultural Committee, the chairmen of two committees of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops warned that the Senate’s current Farm Bill proposal “falls short of the Farm Bill’s historic bipartisanship.”

Archbishop Shelton Fabre, chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and Bishop A. Elias Zaidan, chairman of the Committee on International Justice and Peace, weighed in on various aspects of the bill in a July 9 letter to the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture.

The head of Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Charities USA, Catholic Rural Life, and the National Council of the United States Society of St. Vincent de Paul joined the two prelates in signing the letter.

Seventy-six Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, are holding their final Sunday Masses this weekend.

In April, the archdiocese announced that it would halt Sunday Mass at 84 of its parishes as it consolidates its parishes—163 in number, according to The Official Catholic Directory—into 24 pastorates.

A Nigerian bishop charged that the nation’s government is “unserious” about fighting terrorism.

“In the security challenges that we are facing, we all know that the government is unserious,” Bishop Stephen Dami Mamza of Yola said to a journalist on July 7. “You cannot say that the government doesn’t have a hand in what is happening since the government is not prepared to resolve these issues and also give the military full authority to get rid of the terrorists.”

“We have air power, we have land power, and we have all the necessary advantages that we need in order to get rid of the insurgency,” Bishop Mamza continued. “But there is no will, there is no seriousness, there is no commitment, and there is too much politics in it.”

Bishop Mamza also warned that “both perpetrators of violent terrorism and those who fail in their responsibility to protect lives will face divine accountability ... God knows. His judgment is just and fair.”

The Commission for Canon Law and Legislative Texts of the Latin-rite Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI) clarified canonical norms on biritual faculties, according to Catholic Connect, a CCBI website.

The commission stated that bishops do not have the authority to confer biritual faculties but must seek permission from the Apostolic See. Such faculties are to be granted for only a five-year period, and priests should seek them only to meet a genuine pastoral need, rather than because of “devotional attraction.”

The five Jesuit provincials in Canada and the United States announced the reduction of the number of novitiates in the two nations from five to two.

One will be based in Culver City, California; the other, in Detroit, Michigan.

“Running five novitiates takes an awful lot of Jesuit staff of very good people,” said Father Joseph Daoust, S.J., superior of the Detroit Jesuit community. “You have to have three or four Jesuits in each of the novitiates, who usually are more senior Jesuits who serve as the formators of the novices. If we could put the novices in only two novitiates rather than five, we would save an awful lot of very valuable manpower for other works of the Society of Jesus.”

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